Quite Your Job, Move to Switzerland, Learn to Program

A little over two weeks ago I tried to quit my job, moved to Switzerland, and began teaching myself programming with the goal of switching careers and becoming a developer full time. I say “tried to quit my job” because I did officially quit, had my exit interview, the whole 9 yards, but then at the last minute was asked by our CMO to remain on part time and work remotely from Switzerland managing an internal project.

This turned out to be extremely fortuitous as part of the project requires me to build a Box.com app that automatically generates folder templates in the company’s Box account. So while continueing to work part time will eat into my programming self study, nearly half of that time will be devoted to building a Box.com app with ruby, not to mention I’ll no longer be hemoraging my savings away each month as intially thought :).

I now spend Monday thru Friday from 9am to 7pm at the public library in the Swiss city where I live learning to program and so far it’s going swimmingly.

You might still be wondering how the Switzerland move came about. That was total random dumb luck. I had already made my mind up about quitting my job and learning programming full time when my girlfriend got a new job with a Swiss company and was required to do a 6 month rotation in Switzerland. Since she was going and I was planning on quiting there seemed no reason not to spend my time studying programming in Switzerland and skiing and eating fondu on the weekends, especially now that I have some income from working part time.

This blog is a place for me to write about how my homeschooling is progressing, what I’m learning, and other musings. I hope it will not only facilitate in my learning, since writing about and teaching a topic is one of the best ways to learn, but maybe be helpful for other current and future self schooling programmers.